The art of getting stuff done without bossing around

&#62; <i>Peter Thiel said PayPal once rejected a top­-notch engineering candidate because he said during an interview that he liked to play “hoops,” and a PayPal engineer does not play basketball, much less “hoops.” </i><p>&#62; <i>Carwoo is a company that’s a little weird, so they ask every interviewee how weird she thinks she is on a scale of 1 to 5. There is a right answer. 3­-4 is the sweet spot ­­a weird person who is self-­aware.</i><p>I'm sorry, but these are just bizarre. Company culture is great, but this just sounds cultish and even cargo-cultish.<p>It strikes me almost as strange that we have anti-discrimination laws for hiring practices concerning races, sexual orientations, religions, etc... but companies are free to discriminate against people who play "hoops" (or don't), or are either insufficiently self-identified "weird", or overly self-identified "weird".<p>Well you just can't legislate against human stupidity...

The danger of OKR's/PKI's and other "measurements" is that it's easy to do management-by-numbers. Management-by-numbers is to great management as paint-by-numbers is to great painting.

<i>At the end of every week, month, and quarter, individuals measure themselves against their OKRs to evaluate performance.</i><p>Lee Iacoca used the same technique when rising through Ford's managerial ranks. He met with his direct reports quarterly, reviewed their progress over the past 3 months, and set objectives for their next 3 months. Then both schedule the next review and sign all the paperwork. He required that his direct reports have the same quarterly reviews their subordinates, recursing down the chain.<p>This, Iacoca's autobiography says, not only makes sure both sides know what was agreed to, but gets them talking to one another, and at least communicating on progress. Managers need to be part of the team too -- their role is to remove roadblocks preventing the the team from shipping.

At Linux kernel, they just write code, test and send patches.)